We’ve heard a lot about Far Cry 5, and now we’ve finally played it. It doesn’t just offer a radically different setting from the series’ norm. It tweaks the Far Cry formula in some interesting ways—in terms of how you progress through its world, improve your character and more. We wanted to show all of you.

The video with this post will show you about 20 minutes of early exploration. We don’t do any story missions and we’re overall not very far into the game. But we’re deep enough to understand how the game works and to share it with you.

Far Cry 5 is Ubisoft’s latest entry in the 14-year-old series and this game takes the franchise from exotic locales to present day United States inside of the fictional Hope County, Montana. It’s home to a religious militia called The Project at Eden’s Gate that has infiltrated every facet of society to create its own sovereign nation full of hostile and heavily armed camps that threaten the larger community that surrounds it. You play as “The Deputy”—male or female—who originally visits Hope County in the hopes of arresting cult leader Joseph Seed. Sure enough, your chopper ride out crashes and now you must survive in order to free your friends and rid the land of one of the creepiest fictional cults around.

We packed as much as we could in the video, to give you a tour of the game. We’re only a few hours into things, so don’t worry about spoilers. Here are some of the things you’ll see:

In typical Far Cry fashion, you’ll shoot, drive, swim, pretty much blow up everything in your path and watch it’s intricate web of systems interact with one another. Your best plans may quickly spill into chaos.

As we show in the video, Far Cry 2’s buddy system has been greatly expanded for this game. You can always have backup by way of computer-controlled characters who also have special abilities like automatically tagging enemies or being harder to discover. I’m going to have a hard time switching from the adorable dog, Boomer, since you can walk up and pet him for instant puppy therapy after an intense massacre.

Exploration is different. There’s no more relying on a radio tower to open up the map for you and reveal an overwhelming list of missions. Instead, as you can see in our video, you’ll defog the map simply heading in any direction and stumbling on quests in any particular order. Just by walking around and talking to characters, you’ll unlock new sidequests, including exploration-based “prepper” missions.

You can still gain skills, but not quite the way you used to. You unlock “perks” by completing challenges and receiving points to spend on abilities like a grappling hook, more health and even more weapon slots. So no more skinning wild animals to carry more guns. You can still hunt and skin animals but now you can just sell it all for cash. And of course, that cash can be spent on pretty much anything you like.

There are avoidable microtransactions, best we can tell. A third currency (if you count perk points) can also be collected in the form of silver bars that grant you access to some really cool guns and clothes too. But what if you don’t have enough silver bars, you ask? Well you can just go ahead and charge it to your actual real life credit card and spend real money. All of that stuff can be applied to your custom character.

Advertisement

I’m about 4 hours into the game. I’m really intrigued by Far Cry 5’s creepy yet beautiful setting and loving how streamlined a lot of its systems are so far. I’m extremely curious to see how the story unfolds too. Check out me and Stephen play a small chunk of the game and explain how it all works. Far Cry 5 comes out on March 27 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows.

If you want to see everything that happens in the first hour of the game, watch this: